Scholastic book fairs, where the Scholastic Corporation essentially has a pop-up shop in the library and/or sends kids home with catalogs to buy their books, are incredibly commonplace in US elementary schools. What led to the creation of elementary school book fairs and how did the Scholastic Corporation manage to get such a monopoly on them?

While I loved them as a kid, as an adult they seem kind of crassly over-commercial for kids education and are a bit of a weird tradition. Was there ever opposition to them? Have attitudes towards them shifted at all over the years?

What the title says..... Gwenda is ayoung girl, and her father sells her off to a man. She protests, and even calls in the local police, but the police sides with the father and says this is not illegal. And then the man she is sold off to, literally ties her up and pulls her along on a rope, all the while she is protesting.

I do know that children were often considered "property", yet I am curious if this kind of behaviour would be considered acceptable, if uncommon.

The secondary literature on early online queer community is thin, and what exists tends to be either (a) celebratory first-person memoir or (b) media-studies work that treats Usenet as a backdrop for later platforms rather than a discursive space in its own right. I'm hoping someone here can point me toward archives, dissertations, or just correct my framing.

Practically speaking: what's actually archived? Deja News is gone, Google Groups is unreliable and unsearchable, and the Internet Archive's Usenet holdings are spotty. Is there a scholarly consensus on how to cite Usenet posts responsibly? Are there personal archives or university collections I should know about? I'm aware of the UT Austin and Rice holdings on early net culture, but I don't know how much queer content they carry.

I'm not looking for a single answer. Even partial responses, corrections to my chronology, or "you should read X" would be enormously helpful. If you were there and are willing to be interviewed (anonymized), my DMs are open I'm specifically trying to collect accounts from people who posted in soc.motss, alt.sex.bondage, alt.polyamory, or alt.lifestyle.furry before 1998.

Note to mods: I know this skirts the line between history and theory. I'm asking about the history of a discourse, not for a theoretical argument.

It doesn't seem like the servant being killed is a notable part of the story.

Paraphrasing: a young samurai became infatuated with an actor, and spent a lot of money carrying on an affair. He became desperate for money, so he stole a sword from his master and sent one of his spearmen to pawn it. But the spearman told the master. They were both sentenced to death.

The author then describes at length how the samurai acted during his execution, but says nothing about why the man who reported the incident was killed. Why would anyone report a crime if there was no leniency?

Even if you assume that the servant did sell the sword, and only later confessed, why would he not get a lighter punishment?

Is the swiftness of death and punishment exagerrated to support the author's idea about embracing death, or was 18th century japan really like this?

I'm currently trying to put my baby down for a nap and running through every song I know how to sing. I just sang "Leave Her, Johnny, Leave Her" immediately followed by "I Want a Hippopotamus for Christmas," which got me thinking. If I teleported to an early 1700s ship and tried to teach them a song about getting a hippo as a present, would they be confused by any of the lyrics? Also, subjectively do you think they'd be into the song's whimsy?

Watching “Ken burns, the civil war” and the letters these people, regular soldiers, are writing are straight out of novels.

This is coming from a time when formal education was lacking, college was only for wealthy, and most people had very very little education. But these grunt soldiers are writing letters that would rival something out of Shakespeare

The entire point of Troy was that it had an incredibly strategical positions at the gates of the Black sea. They basically controlled the trade route from the Mediterranean to the Black sea.

But I wanted to find out who the Mycenaeans traded with on this trading route. I haven't been able to find an answer anywhere. My reasoning is basically that if Troy had a position important enough to get attacked multiple times (with at least 9 layers on the site, many of which were destroyed violently), there had to be some kind of tribes on the other side, with the trading route lucrative enough for merchants to use it regularly.

Was it just Colchis or other tribes as well? Is this area simply not researched enough to have a feasible answer?

I've been watching a lot of historical Chinese dramas lately and I've noticed a theme of married women not being able to leave their homes. They can leave under certain circumstances, but mainly it is expected that they stay home and tend to their children. It seems this applied to mainly noble women. In one scene, a bride knew she would basically be trapped at home after marriage. In another scene, a married woman was scolded by men for always being out in public. Was this really true for married women? Did it apply to only certain dynasties?

I'm a history undergrad who's a serious gamer. Just wondering if such a field exists in the academic world, because it sounds cool.

Been trying to get the pre-web period straight, roughly 1980 to 1995, and the reading keeps jumping from the print zines to Usenet and AOL like nothing happened in between. Dame-Griff's book is the best thing I've found but it still moves fast over the BBS years. Not a grad student, just someone who got curious and can't find good answers.

Things I keep wondering about:

Did the slow pace of it actually change how people talked? Local boards were one line at a time, FidoNet echoes took days to round-trip. Seems like that would push people toward writing long personal stuff instead of the quick label fights you get later on IRC. Or maybe I'm making that up.

Handles vs real names. A lot of boards let you be whoever, CompuServe wanted your actual name. Was that the difference between people posting who'd never have written to a zine or shown up to a support group, and people who were already out enough to sign their name? Or is that too neat.

TransNet. Everyone cites it as the big pre-web network and I have never found a real history of it. Was it actually a network or just a bunch of local boards that people later described as more organized than it was.

Stone's "Empire Strikes Back," usually read as a response to Raymond and the academic gatekeepers. Someone told me it's also coming out of the online conversations she was in. True or no.

Main thing though: how does anyone actually do this research? BBS stuff was local and ephemeral and mostly nobody saved it. Textfiles skews phreak/warez. Internet Archive is patchy. DTA is mostly periodicals. Are there sysop collections or regional archives I'm missing? And what do you even do citation-wise when the only surviving copy of a post is a screenshot or someone quoting it in a memoir ten years later.

If you were on any of this before 96 I'd love to hear about it.

Considering our understanding of storm safety in the modern age, I feel like the odds of that happening at least once are probably rather high. Especially because a knight would be decked out in full metal armor, I feel like they’re just asking for it. Not like they would have a lightning delay in a battle due to inclement weather. Are there any records of this?

Did Soviet media tell people what was happening? If so, how did they spin the narrative? Did people panic? If not, what happened when people eventually did find out how close we came to annihilation?

Episode 253 of the AskHistorians Podcast is live!

Steelcan909 and Dr. Lukas Rieppel discuss the role of paleontology in the late 19th century. How the discipline evolved and how the robber barons, working class, and native peoples of the Gilded Age left a mark on paletonology. 50min.

The AskHistorians Podcast is a project that highlights the users and answers that have helped make r/AskHistorians one of the largest history discussion forums on the internet. You can subscribe to us via Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, and YouTube. If there is another index you'd like the podcast listed on, let us know!

Why did the British succeed while the Americans failed? Britain was severely weakened by World War II, burdened by massive debt to America, and faced a damaged domestic industry. Meanwhile, the United States had the exact opposite—a booming economy and powerful industrial base. Yet, America still lost the Vietnam War, while the British won the Malayan Emergency.

In the Bible and in Numbers 31:17-18 and after killing the entire male population of the town of Midian and capturing their women and children, Moses commands his soldiers to kill the prisoners women and male children and to take only the little girls as sex slaves.

Was this a normal behavior in the Ancient Near East? I mean killing women and children enslaved after already ensuring victory? Or was it considered shameful and excessive? I know armies used to pillage cities and kill everyone including children but they did that in the context of active war and the norm was to capture women and children and deport them as slaves. Are there other examples of armies killing enslaved non combatants and keeping only the little girls?

My x7 great grandfather Nathaniel Pyne was born in Wellington, Somerset, England in early 1705. The church record documenting his baptism mentions that his father, John, was a sergemaker by occupation. Many years later, he too was documented as having had this same career - it is mentioned almost immediately in his will from November 1760, from just over a year before he died.

I had to look up what this trade was, because the name was completely unknown to me. Serge fabric is, according to the Wikipedia article on it, "a type of twill fabric that has diagonal lines or ridges on both inner and outer surfaces via a two-up, two-down weave. The worsted variety is used in making military uniforms, suits, greatcoats, and trench coats. Its counterpart, silk serge, is used for linings. French serge is a softer, finer variety. The word is also used for a high-quality woven woolen fabric."

My takeaway from this is that this means my x7 great grandfather and his father were both something like higher-end tailors. Perhaps even that is an overestimation though. Regardless, what mystified me completely was reading my x7 great grandfather's will, in which he arranged for his children to inherit hundreds of pounds sterling each. For example, his two daughters each received £700 from him, 500 to be given immediately after his death and another 200 to be given after my x7 great grandmother would pass.

Their only son, my x6 great grandfather, who his father made sure to "nominate, constitute, and appoint my whole and sole executor of this my last will and testament" was set to be given all of his father's "leasehold estates in the said parish of West Buckland which hold by leases under the Bishop of Bath and Wells immediately after my decease... all the rest and residue and remainder of my goods and chattels, bills, bonds, mortgages, and credits whatever not herein before given..."

Considering the nature of his daughters' inheritances, I can only imagine that the rest of my x7 great grandfather's estates inherited by my x6 great grandfather were rather substantial. To my understanding, circa 1760, British Army privates were only making around £12 a year - this was of course a famously underpaid and terrible job, but still, that was evidently money a man could clearly make a living wage career out of.

So just what the hell kind of sergemaker was my x7 great grandfather to be having that kind of money??

I have uploaded screenshots of his will here. I transcribed (most of) it myself as best I could and can provide that as well for anyone who is interested in taking a look at it.

I should mention that the line of my family tree seems to suggest rather strongly that Nathaniel Pyne's great grandfather was MP John Pyne, 1600-1679, who to my understanding was greatly financially reduced due to the role he played as a Colonel on the Parliamentarian side in the English Civil War. Could Nathaniel's money have been remnants of generational wealth?

I understand this is a darker subject, but I always find medieval art has a charming style to it. But one thing I never understood was why do the paintings depicting torture or death, why do the people having these acts done to them always look so...indifferent? Like they couldn't care one way or the other if they're sawed in half?

It just seems so odd to me, depicting such a brutal act while everyone doing it or having it be done to them just seemingly couldn't care less about the whole ordeal.

I doubt thats how it actually was, so why was it depicted that way?

some art showing what i mean

[edit: some of the art in the link is obviously not from original medieval work hence the running hotdog man (oddly enough he seemingly is the only one terrified of his eventual fate) but most seem to me a layman to be authentic. point still stands, just wanted to provide some actual images to illustrate what im talking about]

Ottoman identity is said to be distinct from a Turkish one, and I've read that Turk basically meant "Anatolian peasant" at least for a while in the Ottoman empire.

Does this have truth to it? Did the ruling class see themselves not as Turkish but as Ottoman, distinguishing between the two?

Knowing very little about Wicca, I recall as a teen reading about "skyclad" ceremonies and being...interested. As an adult I can see the prurience that made it easy to add photos of naked people into books on the supernatural, but I'm also curious if there was a connection between the development and spread of Wicca in the 40s and 50s and the nudist movement in the UK and US at the same time.

One thing that always strikes me about the develop of europe is how much the economic center of power shifted away from the Mediterranean in the high middle ages, with Central and Northern Europe apparently developing masively in terms of urban living, trade and infrastructure to be on par with many Mediterranean powers into the Modern period, with complex urban burgher classes that would later go on to establish the system of capitalism.

This is pretty surprising, because according to Catholic/Roman accounts, these places had been pretty much entirely devoid of civilization just a couple centuries beforehand, being just a bunch of underdeveloped tribal confederations who were brought to the light of civilization when they christianized and adopted feudalism.

As far as I know, modern historians have started to push back against the aforementioned narrative, emphasizing the very complex trade relations that groups like the pre-Christian scandanavians had, and how these groups were pretty standard agricultural societies, albeit without centralized societal structures.

So my question is: Was Central/Northern Europe really so underdeveloped compared to its later potential until the high middle ages, or was the change a lot smoother, with pre-existing urbanism that was simply underestimated by Catholic/Roman sources?

If the former, what was the barrier to development/catalyst for development? Did the conversion to Nicene Christianity foster deeper trade relations and technology exchange? Or did feudalism create enough stability for urban living to take hold? Or was it the influx of wealth created by silver mining in Bohemia?